Without limiting the scope of the invention, its background is described in connection with optically based sensor systems, as an example.
Heretofore, in this field, the development of surface plasmon resonance-based sensors for the analysis of specific molecular interactions within specimens or samples have required expensive equipment, highly trained personnel, large samples, and days to weeks to complete. While molecular interaction and binding analysis has been an active area of research, present systems are limited in the range of applications and are unable to be used to analyze large numbers of specific compounds.
An active area of sensor development has been the use of an optical phenomenon known as surface plasmon resonance (SPR). Biosensors of this type, such as the BIAcore line from Biacore, Upsala, Sweden, are available for use in research and development. Two factors limiting the general use of SPR biosensors, however, are the relatively high cost of developing and using specific biosensors and the inability to increase the sample throughput. One solution to the inability to increase sample throughput has been to purchase a number of SPR-based machines that are run in parallel. The purchase and operation of large numbers of these machines for true high throughput testing is, however, prohibitive.